Simon Elected to the Royal Society
Simon has been elected to the Royal Society in the 2024 round of elections. He is elected alongside a group of over 90 researchers from around the world, ten of whom are from the University of Oxford. The award recognises the group's development of innovative and highly original synthetic approaches to novel Main Group compounds, and demonstration of their capabilities in the activation of small molecules critical to catalytic processes.
Nucleophilic Calcium Fluoride Complexes
Job's work in collaboration with Mathias and the Gouverneur group, detailing synthetic and reactivity studies aimed at determining structure/activity relationships for the delivery of fluoride from molecular calcium fluoride complexes is just out in Nature Chemistry. Thanks to the OxICFM CDT for helping facilitate a fantastic new collaboration! Click on the scheme for a link to the original article...
New IMAT Doctoral Training Centre
We are thrilled to announce that the new IMAT Centre for Doctoral Training has been funded by a combination of the EPSRC and a consortium of industrial partners, and will be recruiting students for October 2025. The new centre, a follow-on from the successful OxICFM CDT, is jointly hosted by Oxford's Departments of Chemistry and Materials and focusses on training students to address future challenges in inorganic chemistry and materials science. Click on the logo for a link to the new CDT website....
Be-Be bond published in Science
Joe's recent work on the synthesis and reactivity of diberyllocene, CpBeBeCp is just out in Science magazine. This compound represents an unambiguous Be(I) species and the first stable molecule containing a Be-Be bond (the lightest metal-metal bonding combination). Joe exploited a soluble magnesium(I) reductant to reduce beryllocene, CpBeCp, in high yield, and showed that the Be(I) product can be used as a transfer agent for the CpBe unit towards other metals...